Oracle's Grand Multicloud Gamble

Oracle is unlike any other hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google) in the world. At the Oracle CloudWorld 2023 keynote, Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison said that customers already have been using multi-cloud products and services, and there are more strong reasons to believe it should be interoperable and interconnected more than ever. 

“Last week, I met the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, and we had a wonderful chat,” said Ellison, saying that there should not be any walls between the clouds – “Cloud Should be Open.” 

Citing Salesforce, Microsoft and AWS on how its customers are running their applications on the cloud, Larry looks to eliminate barriers between different cloud platforms and allow them to work together smoothly. “If you want to move your data out of the AWS cloud and put it into a database. It is your data,” avered Larry, hinting that the extended partnership with Microsoft is just the beginning. 

Will AWS & Google Cloud Join? 

“I think it's inevitable that we will support other clouds. We're happy to have that conversation. I would say that it's not a matter of if; it's a matter of when it's going to happen” said SVP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Karan Batta, in an exclusive interaction with AIM, at Oracle CloudWorld 2023, Las Vegas. 

“For us multi-cloud is not just one product. It’s a portfolio of products” said Batta, talking about its partnership with Microsoft and the launch of Oracle Database Service for Azure (OracleDB for Azure) last year, and said that they have about 12 regions interconnected with Microsoft so far. 

With OracleDB@Azure, customers can now use OracleDB services through Microsoft Azure. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is directly embedded into Microsoft Azure data centres, solving the issue of latency and performance challenges, thereby providing a smooth experience for customers. 

“We've always thought of OCI as a cloud that should be able to be workable and interoperable within any cloud,” shared Bhatta. 

Further, he said that last year Oracle worked on a mechanism where one could run and deploy Amazon’s Aurora through OCI. However, he said that it was more of a proof of concept but it showed the ability, hinting that more cloud providers are likely to partner with Oracle in the coming months. 

Why it make sense

“Customers are going to demand it, people want to use the best of breed from intercloud. They want to use the Oracle database from here, and maybe they want to use something else from another cloud provider,” said Batta, emphasising on how enterprises love the multiple-cloud approach. 

This makes total sense. For instance, Amazon Bedrock currently hosts models from AI21, Cohere, Anthropic Claude 2, and Stability AI SDXL 1.0. Similarly Google’s Vertex AI’s Model Garden hosts PaLM 2, TII’s Falcon and Meta’s Llama 2 along with several other models. By strategic collaboration with Oracle, their customers would be getting the best of both worlds. 

Nadella also stressed: “AI exists because of data. When I look at anything that you do around AI, you need to have access to data,” indicating that there is no better player than Oracle, which focuses on best-in-class enterprise data security, alongside pay as you go (PAYG) and the universal credit annual commitment model among other benefits.

“I personally think at the end of the day customers will end up choosing multiple cloud providers ,” said Batta,“I think it's a matter of when, if every customer is going to want to deploy multiple clusters.”

Corey Sanders, corporate vice president of Microsoft Cloud, also believes that multi cloud will be the norm. “And part of me hopes that this is the sort of onset to broader partnerships across many of the cloud providers,” he added.